Text messaging is a commercial success for the mobile telephone industry. Cellular telephone customers contract with their cellular provider to send and receive text messages on their cellular telephones. Common communications protocols for text messages are Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS). The SMS standard was defined as part of the GSM series of standards in 1985 to allow users to send messages of up to 160 characters to and from GSM Mobile handsets. The SMS protocol has been expanded to other mobile handset protocols and is currently used by several billion people worldwide. A common protocol for exchanging SMS messages between SMS peer entities is Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP).
In text messaging, a first mobile telephone user uses the keypad on a mobile telephone to enter a text message, enters a telephone number of a second mobile telephone user to receive the message and then sends the message. The second user can, if the second user's phone is text enabled, read the message on the mobile telephone display and choose to reply by entering a text message and sending the reply to the first user. Text messages are frequently typed in abbreviated language such as “r u” for “are you” and have the advantage over voice based communication that a text message can be read and replied to quietly and at the convenience of the recipient so that the pace of a text message exchange naturally adjusts to the circumstances of both participants. For example, an attorney in a court room can receive a text message with important information concerning the case he is trying while in the courtroom, continue to try the case, and reply to the text message with a further question at that time or later during a recess in the case. Because sending and receiving text messages is relatively soundless and the contents of the messages are not readily visible to other than the intended recipients, text messaging is a discrete method of communication that people find useful in a wide variety of contexts.
The MMS protocol is an extension of the SMS protocol and allows a mobile telephone user to send multimedia data in addition to text. A common use of the MMS protocol is to send a picture taken with one camera phone to another mobile telephone.
The Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) specification finalized in 2007 allows the combination of mobile cellular phones and wireless IP networks. UMA technology allows a user to access GSM and GPRS mobile services over unlicensed spectrum technologies, including Bluetooth and 802.11.
FIG. 1 shows a commercially-available UMA specification network, the T-Mobile@Home network, which connects a mobile telephone 101 and the T-Mobile website 102. Three routes for connecting to the website 102 are available to the mobile telephone 101: via a wireless router 103 which is connected to the internet 106; via a GSM cellular connection 104 which is located between the mobile telephone and 102; and, via a WiFi connection 105 through a T-Mobile HotSpot router 107 to the internet 106 and then to 102. The handset 101 selects from the three routes on the basis of the relative signal strength of each route.
As shown in FIG. 2, a UMA enabled dual-mode handset 201 connects to both a cellular Radio Access Network (RAN) 202 and an Unlicensed Mobile Access Network (UMAN) 203, and both 202 and 203 connect to the core mobile network 204.
By deploying UMA technology, service providers enable subscribers to roam and, with suitable equipment, to handover mobile telephone calls between cellular networks and public and private unlicensed wireless networks using dual-mode mobile handsets. Such subscribers receive a consistent user experience for their mobile voice and data services as they transition between networks. For example, a user having a residential system such as that shown in FIG. 2 transfers a mobile telephone call carried on the RAN 202 to the UMAN 203 automatically as the mobile telephone comes within the range of the Unlicensed Wireless Network 208, IP Access Network 209 and UMA Network Controller (UNC) 210. Alternately, the Network Controller 210 is a Femtocell Network Controller. The mobile telephone call automatically transfers to the base transceiver stations 205, private network 206, and Base Station Controller (BSC) 207 of the RAN 202 when the mobile telephone leaves the effective range of the UMAN 203.
Cellular telephone service providers, such as AT&T Wireless, allow reception of SMS messages that are sent by email from a computer with internet access.
A system and method are needed which allow a mobile telephone user to send SMS and MMS addressed in native form (i.e. using a telephone number) to non-telephone devices such as personal computers that have IP and MAC addresses.